Keeping It Real (13 page)

ng h
i
m squirm. He gets all High Elf an
d
sanctimonious, an
d
his ears get
right
back like they're wel
d
e
d
to his hea
d
,
a
n
d
he gets re
a
ly intense
a
n
d
kin
d
a ma
d
. St
i
l as a statue, just frozen w
i
th r
a
ge, c
a
n't
d
o a
d
amn thing.' She laughe
d
at the thought. 'Never tire of that. An
d
trust me, he's
so
gonna lose.'

'Don't be ri
d
ic-' But Lila bit her wor
d
s back because Zal returne
d
, gave them both a
da
rk look,
a
n
d

threw his bag at the be
d
where it thumpe
d
against Sorch
a
's si
d
e.

'Ship out, Sorch
a
,' he suggeste
d
. 'My sh
ad
ow and I have stuff to argue about.'

'Don't
I know it.' Sorcha got
up and gave Lila a w
i
nk as she moved to the door. She looked at Zal

over her shoulder and sa
i
d something
i
n demon
i
c to h
i
m. L
i
la could hear
i
t but, unlike other languages of the Realms
,
demonic sounded like music instead of words to ears it wasn't meant for and she had no

idea what was sai
d
.

Sorcha blew him a kiss with a flicker of yellow fire between her lips and left the door open after her.

Zal walked across and shut it with a kick before turning to Lila. 'I'm not
leaving here tonight'

'You have to,' Lila said primly. 'It's all arranged.'

'Un-arrange it.'

'I'll carry you out if I have to.'

'You will not.' He folded his arms
a
nd plante
d
his feet.

'I will so.' She found herself copying his stance.

He dodged her, jumping across the bed and out through the adjoin-ing door into her room. Lila was so

taken aback by his speed, and so grounded in the posture, that
she didn't
even move for a good couple

of seconds. As she ran after him she could hardly believe it had come to this.

All the other intervening doors were open. She saw him hurdle the one sofa that
stood in his way as he

crossed the ocean-view room and then he was onto the balcony and over the rail before she had time to

shout
out. If there had been a Severed Realms Olympiad the elves would win all the running events, Lila

reflected as she watched Zal land with cat-precision, roll and keep running in a leap that would have

broken the legs of any ordinary human being. As she landed from her drop she felt a sharp and sudden

pain and heard the whine and grind of machinery as motors worked to protect her. Darts and needles

seemed to be pricking the inside of her legs and along the inner surface of her spine. She realised her

mistake in not
ditching the armouring of her legs, though it wasn't so bad yet, she could run.

But Zal was fast over the track into the hill woodland and Lila felt
her new pain increase steadily as she

pursued him. Her Al-self implored her to stop, informed her that an increased effort
could result
in

serious tearing between the new layers of flesh and system. But
Zal's training had obviously worked well

for him and she could see that
if she even slowed down he would lose her. Lila ran on, burdened by the

excess weight
of her weapons
.

Slowly she gained on him until they reached the summit of the hill when she lost
sight
of the flag of his

pale hair
.
He had turned off the path and into the dense woodland there. Lila turned at
the same spot.

A blast
of icy air and wind suddenly hit
her in the face. Leaves and earth pelted her skin and went in

her eyes, blinding her. She couldn't stop fast enough and her left shoulder struck the stiff trunk of a young

oak tree, spinning her around and knocking the breath out of her. Invisible hands pushed her down

towards the ground and she was off balance and fell beneath them as earth elementals tried to bury her.

She'd never seen them cluster and work together so fiercely before. Although it hurt and made life

difficult, once she realised what it was she was able to stand up and step back to the path to clear her

eyes. When she had she was able to look into the shadows.

Earth, air and stone spirits clustered thickly beneath the trees'

protection, shifting restlessly from form to form, from mist to nothing and back again. Eyes that
were

empty spaces in nebulous bodies glared at her, ballooned and vanished only to reappear a moment later.

Somewhere close by a wood ghost clattered its flutelike bones against living treetrunks. Lila heard an

eagle cry out from far above her, alarmed by the presence of so much primordial force in one spot.

She put her foot off the path and immediately they came together again, all the small spirits rushing to

create the semi-material body of a giant elk, its rack of antlers lowered against
her. Lila could only think

that
Zal was getting away from her and her chances of catching him up or even finding him must be

vanishing with every second.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'But you're in my way.' She stepped forward, braced her arms against the peculiar

sponginess of the elk's form and pushed.

The resistance was ferocious. Lila had no idea that flitting things like elementals could band together

and create something so physically strong, not in Otopia anyway. She dug her feet into the ground for

more purchase but the soil began to shift under her as it was pulled apart from below. In a few more

moments she'd have nothing to stand on.

Lila engaged full power and shoved
.
Pain like raw fire flared along her spine and in her hips as the elk's

insubstance held for an instant and trapped her in a vice between implacable machine and immovable

energy
.
Then all resistance vanished as the elk form fell into pieces. Lila fell forward with a surge, tripping

and sliding on the turbulent ground, feeling like a rider on an uncontrollable horse. She just managed to

keep her footing and weave between the trees, moving fast
enough to keep the elementals from

coalescing again, although they harried her as best they could. They tore her hair, threw leaves, sticks and

small branches at
her, tried to move the stones under her feet as she ran.

Zal must have been tiring, because there were clues for Lila to see: a snapped twig, a footprint
in

flattened grass . . . And then she came out into a little glade very unexpectedly. She slid down a short

embank-ment and into the low point
of a dip in the ground, stopping just
in front
of Zal. He was sitting

with his head thrown back, gasping for breath, sweat running off him. There was a strange silence and

still-ness - Lila realised it was because the elementals had stopped their pestering.

'What the hell are you doing?' She'd finally come to the end of her

patience
.
Her vision was covered in red warning readouts which were completely unnecessary because

she could feel the damage the run had done to her
.

Zal glanced at her, slightly grey beneath the flush of effort. For the first
time she saw his cool crack at

the edges. 'I have to be here,' he said shortly. 'I'm not going anywhere else. I suppose you can hang

around and watch if you want to, but I'd prefer it if you stood outside the circle. I'm sure you would too.'

He got
up and brushed himself down with something like self-consciousness. Then, without
asking her

again, he started talking elvish. Or rather, he didn't
speak it, he sang it, as though it was demonic, and the

lilting peculiar harmonics of the two combined to make the hair on Lila's neck stand up. Suddenly she

had no problem at all getting out
of the way - none of her flesh and bone wanted to be inside the space

he was creating with his spell.

Outside the range of his influence, the elementals returned in force, but although they crawled and

clawed over her with semi-solid fingers their real interest lay beyond the heat
shimmer of the magical

barrier Zal had sketched around himself
.
Like her, they watched with avid curiosity
.

The peculiarity of it
didn't
strike her immediately - Lila was not
familiar with magic in a user's way - but

then it
dawned on her that probably, if he were going to do anything important, she should have been

inside
the circle, surely, and not
outside where she was unpro-tected. But
on the heels of that
thought

she realised that she was protected after all, because he'd reversed the normal order of things. The circle

that Zal had cast put the world inside it. He was the one outside.

'Hey!' she said, moving automatically into a state where what weaponry she had was armed. 'I say

again - what the hell?'

But
Zal wasn't
able to hear her, or more likely didn't care. Then, one by one, the elementals of the

forest
began to slip past Lila, into his space. From their touches she could sense their eagerness to obey

the summons of his song. Once they passed the barrier their manifestation changed. On Lila's human

Earth, the fifth world of Otopia, elemental beings had wispy and ethereal presences. But
Zal had taken

his circle out
of Earth's domain. It
was part of the elemental's home system now - a part of First
Realm:

Zoomenon.

The elementals came into their true form and power. Wood, metal, earth, water, air, fire. From her

studies Lila knew that
these beings

didn't
exist as separated entities in Zoomenon and this was true, she saw now. They united instantly into a

multicoloured rainbow haze of energy, which pulsed and danced like the Northern Lights on a dark

winter night. She saw Zal through the brilliant light, bathing in it, his head thrown back in abandonment,

and belatedly recognised that
what
she was looking at was the junkie's hit.

The elemental forces coiled over him eagerly and poured in through his nostrils, mouth, eyes and ears,

exiting through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet
to circle around and fly at him again. Zal

shook where he stood, fell to his knees, and then over onto his face.

Lila was numb with shock when she heard the arrow whip past her ear, saw it rebound from the

magical field of the circle and fall at her feet. As it touched the ground it became a snake, yellow and

black striped, and coiled swiftly away from her into the undergrowth
.
Then her radar found the elf

assassins, one coming through the treetops, the other, who had shot, making its way along the ground.

She cancelled all her fright readouts and set out for the ground walker at a dead run, flechette clips

arming, switching her body's gross and fine motor controls over to her Al-self's superior communications

speeds: it could outdo her natural neurons by a factor of two. Her reactor increased output and she

became instantly faster and stronger, so when the arrow that was meant for her came flying towards her

she was able to bat it aside without losing momentum. The enchanted flight turned back to search for her,

but found the armour on her back suddenly too hard, too electromagnetically polarised for its magical

fields to penetrate. It blew into dust as Lila saw her quarry step forth casually into full view with the aloof

poise of every miserable High Elf she'd ever known. Cold fear drenched her inside, but the machine parts

of her didn't care about that; they gave her more power than she could handle.

At
least, she consoled herself, she didn't know this one personally. The elf woman's long ears were

pierced and decorated with hawk-feathers and her hair had been tamed with dark wax and braided

tightly into a queue that hung across her shoulder. Her earth-toned clothes flickered with the shadows of

forests that grew in Alfheim, not the Otopian woodland she stood in now.

'Lila Black,' said this monstrosity, as though announcing the name of a new and particularly unsavoury

insect
species she had just
discovered.

'Haven't
got
time,' Lila said, breaking the conversational charm
.
She knew that this one intended to

distract her while the other waited for Zal's circle to break down. That would happen if he lost

consciousness and, having seen what he was doing, she didn't hold out much hope of that being anything

other than a matter of time.

The elf agent's blue eyes flashed disdainfully, and with insouciant
ease she crouched and made a

six-metre vertical jump, making for the higher branches of the tree she stood beneath, where a